Overview:

As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.

The displacement in science of “positivist” notions of observation by a “realist” model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children’s stories of Miyazawa Kenji.

Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief.

Synopsis:

As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.

The displacement in science of “positivist” notions of observation by a “realist” model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children’s stories of Miyazawa Kenji.

Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief.

Journal of Asian Studies

Golley's book is eloquent and erudite, offering subtle critiques of our understanding of the literary history of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s through both a fine-grained historical account of the discourses of the "new scientific realism" in prewar Japan and through a series of rereadings of some of the major figures of the interwar period.

 Jonathan Zwicker

Table of Contents:

Prologue 1Introduction 10The Revolt against Positivism 23Science and Sensibility 33Art and Accuracy 39Language and the Politics of Realism 53The Things of This World 62Art, EmpireErotic Science: Realism and Aesthetics in the Fiction of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro 73Surface and Depth 77Pornographic Realism 88Truth in Advertising 101Erotic Science 111A Dark Ecology: Yokomitsu Riichi's Universe 121When Was Shanghai? 128A Dark Ecology 134Mapping the Empire 140The Fourth Person 154Earth, StarsThings Near and Far Away: Geometry and Ethics in the Stories of Miyazawa Kenji 163You Are Here 174Society and the Fourth Dimension 182Space Is Not Empty 196The Ethics of Realism 205The Wild and the Cultivated: Kenji, Darwin, and the Rights of Nature 215The Wild and the Cultivated 228The Sacramental Economy 240The Border Country 247Progress and the Struggle forExistence 256Brethren in Pain: Beauty, Objectivity, and the Lives of Bears 266The Accurate and the Beautiful 269Love and Objectivity 282Epilogue 307Reference MatterNotes 313Works Cited 357List of Characters 379Index 385

Journal of Asian Studies

Golley's book is eloquent and erudite, offering subtle critiques of our understanding of the literary history of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s through both a fine-grained historical account of the discourses of the "new scientific realism" in prewar Japan and through a series of rereadings of some of the major figures of the interwar period.

— Jonathan Zwicker

Journal of Japanese Studies

In his fascinating new study...Gregory Golley offers new perspectives on the ethical dimensions of twentieth-century literature by his rigorous consideration of both the art and the science of [Miyazawa] Kenji's work, together with that of his fellow members of Japan's modernist generation, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Yokomitsu Riichi...Golley's study makes for compelling reading and represents a major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Japanese modernism.
— William O. Gardner